I'm Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl

About this item

From acclaimed author Gretchen McNeil comes her first realistic contemporary romance - perfect for fans of Kody Keplinger's The Duff and Morgan Matson's Since You've Been Gone.

Beatrice Maria Estrella Giovannini has life all figured out. She's starting senior year at the top of her class, she's a shoo-in for a scholarship to M.I.T., and she's got a new boyfriend she's crazy about. The only problem: All through high school Bea and her best friends Spencer and Gabe have been the targets of horrific bullying.

So Bea uses her math skills to come up with The Formula, a 100% mathematically guaranteed path to social happiness in high school. Now Gabe is on his way to becoming Student Body President, and Spencer is finally getting his art noticed. But when her boyfriend Jesse dumps her for Toile, the quirky new girl at school, Bea realizes it's time to use The Formula for herself. She'll be reinvented as the eccentric and lovable Trixie - a quintessential manic pixie dream girl - in order to win Jesse back and beat new-girl Toile at her own game.

Unfortunately, being a manic pixie dream girl isn't all it's cracked up to be, and "Trixie" is causing unexpected consequences for her friends. As The Formula begins to break down, can Bea find a way to reclaim her true identity and fix everything she's messed up? Or will the casualties of her manic pixie experiment go far deeper than she could possibly imagine?

About the Author

Gretchen McNeil is an opera singer, writer and clown. Her YA horror POSSESS about a teen exorcist debuted with Balzer Bray for HarperCollins in 2011. Gretchen's follow up TEN - YA horror/suspense about ten teens trapped on a remote island with a serial killer - was a 2013 YALSA Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers, a Romantic Times Top Pick, a Booklist Top Ten Horror Fiction for Youth, a finalist for Washington state's 2015 Evergreen Young Adult Book Award and Vermont's 2014-2015 Green Mountain Book Award, and was nominated for "Best Young Adult Contemporary Novel of 2012? by Romantic Times. In 2013, she released 3:59, a sci-fi doppelganger horror about two girls who are the same girl in parallel dimensions who decide to switch places. In 2014, Gretchen debuted her first series, Don't Get Mad (pitched as "John Hughes with a body count") also with Balzer Bray. GET EVEN and GET DIRTY follow four very different girls who form a secret society where they get revenge on bullies and mean girls at their elite prep school. Gretchen published two novels with HarperCollins in 2016: RELIC, a horror novel about a group of teens who, while exploring an old mine, accidentally unleash a creature who is hunting them down and cannibalizing their bodies; and I'M NOT YOUR MANIC PIXIE DREAM GIRL, her first YA contemporary comedy about a math-minded control freak who loses her boyfriend to the quirky new girl in school and sets out to reinvent herself as a classic manic pixie dream girl in order to win him back. 2018 will see Gretchen return to her roots with the horror-comedy #MURDERTRENDING for Disney/Freeform. Pitched as The Running Man meets Scream Queens, it follows a 17 year old falsely convicted of killing her stepsister and condemned to Alcatraz 2.0, a prison styled after an American suburb where government sanctioned serial killers hunt down convicts and stream their deaths live, and she must survive long enough to prove her innocence. Gretchen's novels have been published internationally in Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, and Czech. GET EVEN and GET DIRTY have been optioned to the BBC, and the film adaptation of TEN starring China Anne McClain (Descendants 2, Black Lightning) , Rome Flynn (The Bold and the Beautiful) , and Callan McAuliffe (I Am Number Four) , directed by Chris Robert for Rain Maker Films, premieres in 2017. Gretchen is a former coloratura soprano, the voice of Mary on G4's and she sings with the LA-based circus troupe Cirque Berzerk. She is repped by Ginger Clark of Curtis Brown, Ltd. You can find Gretchen on , and on her